Writing a Paper

A primary goal of the ARC group is to publish research. Because applied research competitions provide a well-defined evaluation task, dataset, and metric, our focus in writing is to clearly document the system we build and any novel contributions within our workflow.

The Structure of a Competition Paper

A typical competition paper is organized into several key sections. The introduction provides an overview of the paper, context for the dataset and your solution, and the central thesis of your work. This is followed by the background and related work section, which situates your research by discussing past work in the competition, related systems, and any technical context necessary to understand your solution.

The core of the paper is the methodology, where you detail the unique aspects of your system. This includes the tools used, data transformations performed, and any ablation studies conducted to determine the contribution of different components. It should begin with simple baselines that your work improves upon. Crucially, this section must contain all necessary details to ensure your work is reproducible. After the methodology, the results section presents quantitative findings from applying your methods to the data, including pipeline runtimes and performance scores for all systems tested.

The discussion section offers your interpretation of the results and their implications. This is where you analyze why the system behaved as it did and discuss ideas that arose from the experimental outcomes. This section should also include a discussion of future work, outlining potential research directions if you had more time. Finally, the conclusion briefly summarizes the paper's main contributions and closes out the work.

The Writing Process and Timeline

While the intensive coding phase often precedes focused writing, preliminary sections like the literature review can be drafted early in the semester. The main writing effort typically requires 20 to 40 hours over a period of two to four weeks. It is advisable to begin this process as early as possible.

All papers should be written in a collaborative LaTeX environment like Overleaf, using the templates provided by the group or the conference venue. The quality of writing should be high, similar to that expected in a graduate-level course like Machine Learning. The goal is to clearly document the results of the hard work already completed during the research phase.

Using Generative AI Tools

Generative AI tools can be leveraged responsibly as part of the writing process. They are effective for assistive tasks like formatting data into tables or helping to find related works for a literature review. However, you are strongly discouraged from using these tools to generate large portions of your paper, especially the methodology, results, or discussion. Doing the analysis and writing by hand is a critical part of understanding the research domain and demonstrating your comprehension of the work. Using AI to automate the core analysis is a form of academic dishonesty and cheats you of a key learning experience. Always be transparent about your use of these tools and ensure you are representing your school and lab responsibly.

Submission and Peer Review

Once submitted, your paper will undergo peer review. Acceptance rates vary significantly by venue. For workshops like those at CLEF, our group has a high likelihood of acceptance, though you may be required to make revisions based on reviewer feedback. For more selective conferences, the bar for acceptance is much higher. If a paper is not accepted at a particular venue, the work can always be shared publicly by uploading it as a preprint to a server like arXiv.